Storm of the Century: The Labor Day Hurricane of 1935

I learned a lot reading this book about hurricanes, the Florida Keys and the hurricane of 1935. I'm a researcher so books that aren't well researched I just put down but I read this book almost straight through and will read it again.

Drye's experience as a journalist and writer combine to bring this true story to life 85 years later. A must read for anyone interested in hurricanes, history, veterans interest, government mishandling, and humanity in general.

This was well researched and well told. I lived through several hurricanes while living in Florida. Anything under Cat 3 and I stayed.

I grew up in South Florida. Trips to “The Keys” were a joy. I remember fishing from the old 7-mile highway bridge, built on the original railroad bridge after the hurricane destroyed the railroad. I also went through several hurricanes. But even then, the Hurricane of 1935 was seen as cataclysmic. I sought to read first-hand details about that event. But envisioning it was a horror.Storm Features at Landfall• The storm surge reached 19 feet. (The sea level at the Upper and Middle Keys was 5-7 feet.)• Sustained winds were 185 mph.• With a barometric pressure of 892 millibars (26.34 inches), even today this storm remains the most intense U.S. landfalling Atlantic hurricane.In Storm of the Century, author Willie Drye does an excellent job of recreating the background that led the veterans to the keys, the hurricane’s landfall with its tragic losses, and the aftermath of investigations and whitewashes. This period covered about four years. Drye concludes with a “where are they now” retrospective and a recent update on the area’s storm history.The author’s thorough research leaves the reader well-informed. To provide first-hand details, Drye examined past newspapers and periodicals, and visited local libraries and archivists. He also interviewed survivors and relatives of those in the storm. His material is generously annotated at the book’s end, although not indexed within the text.The StoryThe book’s early stages focused on the Depression era “Bonus Army” of World War I veterans who demonstrated for an advance on their bonus payment for wartime service. These desperate individuals converged on Washington D.C. and erected a tent city. Their encampments became an embarrassment to the administration (Hoover’s and Roosevelt’s). A veterans work program in the Florida Keys could extract the demonstrators from Washington. So, the veterans were sent to the Keys to work on an “overseas highway,” a project they would never finish.The Florida Keys in the 1930s were nothing like today. Facilities, transportation, and communications were primitive even by standards then. The main mode for remote travel was by train to Key West or South Florida via an overseas rail line. No connecting highway existed. The native population was sparse: probably under 1,000 outside of Key West. The storm’s target was Islamorada, a strip of land 20 miles long and, at its broadest point, no more than one mile wide.In 1935, hurricane forecasters lacked weather satellites, hurricane reconnaissance aircraft, and technological equipment. Position reports originated from passing ships. A barometer could detect an approaching storm, but could not accurately predict its intensity or direction.Additionally, administrators without hands-on experience were unlikely to be savvy about the tasks and durations needed for hurricane preparation and evacuation. These shortcomings would be exposed during this worst-case storm that changed its direction and rapidly intensified close to shore.Worst off were the vets. Their camps were shoddily built and dangerously located. Lack of advance planning and bureaucratic inertia delayed their evacuation until it was too late. Over 400 people died; more than half, vets.

This is a really fascinating and well told narrative of the 1935 Labor Day hurricane. It reads like fiction!

Storm of the Century reviewMy husband is reading it. He was born in Key West so it is interesting to him.

Very good read w/ strong history component. I particularly liked all the information on Hurricanes, some of the patterns local people look out for during Hurricane season, and known characteristics. I bought another copy and sent it to a friend that lives in Florida. Thought he would enjoy the story and he could use the information for his own benefit and safety.

This was a very interesting book about the plan to build Route 1 the length of the Florida Keys and the circumstances that put thousands on WW I vets in harms way.

I cannot sing the praises of this book often or loud enough. Mr. Drye’s attention to detail about the ‘35 hurricane that swept over 250 WWI veterans to their deaths is a heartbreaking yet necessary look at an event in history that is shamefully overlooked. Highly recommended.

It was my interest in railways that led me recently to buy two vivid and absorbing books concerned with the railway over the Florida Keys that met its destruction on 2 September 1935. The destroying angel that visited Florida on that day has never to my knowledge had an official name like modern hurricanes, but it is still the most powerful wind ever known to have assaulted the USA. It dominates Les Standiford’s Last Train to Paradise; but that is still a book about the railway first and foremost. In Willie Drye’s Storm of the Century the railway is a vital part of the scene but not the main part. The Labor Day orgy of destruction takes up most of the book – that together with the actions (or lack of action) that deposited so many victims in its path; with the chains of miscommunication that hid the truth of what was happening; and with the squalid politics that then masqueraded as enquiries.Willie Drye goes into some detail regarding the formation and development of hurricanes, while still denying that the full story of that phenomenon is completely understood. Their basic ‘fuel’ (a word he uses repeatedly) is warm sea-water; and another factor in the process – one that took me aback – is that in certain circumstances the winds can coil themselves around the central eye, so that the cloud formation is not actually very wide by hurricane standards, while the intensity of the winds is enormous and diabolical. That was the origin of the 1935 Labor Day hurricane.We have to remember that wireless communications and meteorology were at 1935 levels. The author seems to imply that even with up-to-date technologies today prediction of a hurricane’s impending path is not a matter of absolute certainty. With our hurricane-monster still impending it sounds as if locals and experienced natives had a sense for the matter that science could not yet match. The distant weather bureau was doing its conscientious best in putting out weather advisories. These were as good as the state of the art allowed, which of course did not excuse them later from foolish charges of inaccuracy.The Florida Keys are low coral islets, obviously prone to flooding in a region prone to hurricanes. As was alleged in Congress by the formidable New England Republican widow Mrs Rogers, they looked a convenient place to ‘park’ hundreds of WW1 veterans who were unemployed and demanding early payment of promised bonuses. They were an embarrassment to the new President and his New Deal, and the conditions of this ‘relegation’ were squalid in the extreme, something not always admitted, particularly not to the tenacious Mrs Rogers. However it was beginning to penetrate official consciousness that they ought to be moved out of the way of potential harm, whatever anyone chose to believe about the hurricane’s path. Well, the hurricane struck with a violence that nobody had ever experienced before, and the train supposedly being sent to rescue them had still not appeared. They had only their rickety cabins, which the storm smashed like matchwood: ‘residents’ homes fared little or no better; and Willie Drye’s account of the whole scene is almost as devastating to read about as it may have been to experience, if that can even be imagined.The storm eventually moved on, but one further horror that gets the full treatment here is the nauseating condition of the cadavers, attacked immediately by the heat, the humidity and the blowflies. Drye is not rhetorical in his account of the so-called reports that descended into farcical attempts at denying human responsibility for the death and destruction, attributing all that to divine intervention. However clear ‘goodies’ and ‘ baddies’ appear through the murk of lies and prevarication. Mrs Rogers I have mentioned, and another worthy actor was the investigator David Kennamer. This pillar of integrity had pointed his finger at three federal officials, dismissing the Hand of God arguments with the contempt they clearly deserved. If he had had no party politics of any kind his inconvenient conclusions would no doubt have met with the same treatment as they hastily did, but for good measure Drye mentions that he had a long Republican pedigree.Oddly, the most famous denizen of the Keys gets only a passing mention plus a quote from a short newspaper piece. It’s true of course that Ernest Hemingway lived in Key West, which had escaped the worst of it all, but, as Drye again points out, Hemingway was a Republican too, out of sympathy with Mr Roosevelt and his deals. What FDR knew about the plight of the vets and the way they were shunted to their death Drye doesn’t seem to take a position on. One is almost tempted to say that the conditions under which these brave and patriotic rejects were reduced to living for so long was not a lot better.